Nature abhors a vacuum. So does my cat.

Hacker News summary, Monday 27 May 2013, 3:00 p.m. edition

A summary of Hacker News from 3:00 p.m. on Memorial Day. It's getting faster to produce these, but it still takes at least a minute or two per each.

I wonder about the churn rate of the Hacker News front page. How long do you have to wait to ensure that the top 10 posts have all cycled out? Every day is clearly enough, but I'm suspecting that it might take as little as 12 hours to cycle through what passes for news. A useful bit of code would monitor the site, send off a batch of 10 articles to be summarized, and then wait checking periodically until those 10 have all fallen from favor to send out a new batch of 10.

1. Google has plans to outfit high-altitue blimps with telecommunications gear to serve Africa. "Small-scale trials are underway in Cape Town, South Africa," using TV "white spaces" between channels as frequencies. (Wired UK)

2. Matt writes a love letter to WordPress after 10 years of working on it. (Matt Mullenweg)

3. "When not even a Stanford or MIT engineering degree is good enough to keep an engineer employed at 60, there is genuinely no market for engineers that age. Plan accordingly." (Lion of the Blogosphere)

4. Haxe 3.0 is out. Haxe is a multi-platform, strictly typed modern language for cross-system and mobile development. (Haxe)

5. "The hottest tech start-ups are solving all the problems of being twenty years old, with cash on hand, because that’s who thinks them up." (George Packer, New Yorker) Not so fast; "many of the hottest tech start-ups are solving the problems of being a business, because that’s where all the money is." (Ezra Klein, Washington Post)

6. "Unless you put time and effort into reading about and implementing exploits, your home-grown cryptography based security mechanisms don't stand much of a chance against real-world attacks." You are dangerously bad at cryptography; some examples follow. (Ali, Happy Bear Software)

7. If you're looking for open source clones of your favorite games, you've found it here. (Open Source Game Clones)

8. Some silly new annotations for you if you are written Java code, from the Google Annotations Gallery. (GAG) Start with @Noop and end with @Palindrome.

9. "It's nuts that to make a new laptop relatively unthreatening and accessible for an enthusiastic 90-something requires going across a dozen System Preferences panes and sub-panes, and simply having to accept certain things as inevitably confusing." Setting up a Mac for Grandma is an exercise in appreciating the accessibility problems of the Internet. (Accursed Ware)

10. An explanation of SQL joins in Venn diagrams from 2007. (Jeff Atwood) Inspired by a previous post (Ligaya Turmelle). Stack Overflow takes on the more complicated questions where the relationships don't fit into Venn diagrams so neatly. (Stack Overflow)